Showing results by narrator "Olivia Dowd" in All Categories

On a summer's night in 1994, 16-year-old Flora Powell vanished from her sleepy seaside town. She left no trace - only heartache for her mother and her sister, Heather. Twenty-five years later, Heather walks into a stranger's house. There, the loving wife and doting new mother kills two people in cold blood. So only one remains...Jess is sent to report on the case that shocked the hometown she left behind. But it's anything but business to her.

On an island off the windswept Irish coast, guests gather for the wedding of the year – the marriage of Jules Keegan and Will Slater. Old friends. Past grudges. Happy families.Hidden jealousies. Thirteen guests.One body. The wedding cake has barely been cut when one of the guests is found dead. And as a storm unleashes its fury on the island, everyone is trapped. All have a secret. All have a motive.One guest won’t leave this wedding alive....

Twenty-one years ago, Dr Richard Carter and his wife, Pamela, were killed in what has become the most infamous double murder of the modern age. Their 10-year-old daughter - nicknamed the Angel of Death - spent eight years in a children’s secure unit and is living quietly under an assumed name with a family of her own. Now, on the anniversary of the trial, a documentary team has tracked down her older sister, compelling her to break two decades of silence.

An international prize of one billion has been offered to the first man to complete an interplanetary trip, and Dale Curtance, a millionaire adventurer, emerges as the British entrant. With a hand-picked crew, he blasted off from Salisbury Plain in the spaceship Gloria Mundi, destination—the planet Mars. Once free of Earth's atmosphere, they discover a stowaway—a woman. Her extraordinary story helps them prepare for the dangers they encounter on the Red Planet, and the fantastic world that exists there.

Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. Exceptionally bright, she has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose. The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava likes nothing better than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den so she can study it. But one day when she arrives she stumbles across the body of fellow pupil, Mickey Grant. DI Seth Delahaye is given the case, one of the most challenging of his career.

Boldly original, dramatic story of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scots – three queens exercising power in a world dominated by men – Young Queens weaves the personal stories of these three queens into one, revealing their hopes, dreams, desires and regrets in a time when even the most powerful women lived at the mercy of the state.

In December 2003, Luke Ryder was found dead in the garden of the family home in London, leaving behind a wealthy older widow and three stepchildren. Nobody saw anything. Now, secrets will be revealed – live on camera. Years later a group of experts re-examine the evidence on Infamous, a true-crime show – with shocking results. Does the team know more than they’ve been letting on? Or does the truth lie closer to home?

Between working at her brother’s school and typing up Inspector Robert Curran’s police reports, Harriet Gordon has little time for personal pursuits and she has been enjoying the rehearsals for her role in the Singapore Amateur Dramatic and Musical Society’s latest production - Pirates of Penzance. But Harriet quickly discovers tensions run deep within the theatre company and when the leading man is found murdered, suspicions abound, exposing scandalous behavior as well as some insidious crimes.

Platform Seven at 4am: Peterborough Railway Station is deserted. The man crossing the covered walkway on this freezing November morning is confident he's alone. As he sits on the metal bench at the far end of the platform it is clear his choice is strategic - he's as far away from the night staff as he can get. What the man doesn't realise is that he has company. Lisa Evans knows what he has decided. She knows what he is about to do as she tries and fails to stop him walking to the platform edge. Two deaths on Platform Seven. Two fatalities in 18 months - surely they're connected?

Margot Sorrell didn't want to go home. She had spent all her adult life trying not to look behind. But a text from her sister Lucy brought her back to Somerset. 'I need you.' As Margot, Lucy and their eldest sister, Eve, reunite in the house they grew up in beside the river, the secrets they keep from each other and from themselves, refuse to stay hidden. A wedding brings them together but long-simmering resentments threaten to tear the family apart. 

Rose Hamilton is in desperate need of a fresh start. There are so many reasons she should ignore the advertisement: the war, those treacherous seas, her family, her fiancé...but she cannot help herself. Within weeks, she is boarding an enormous convoy, already too attached to five-year-old Walter Lucknow.

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

One day, NICK and BEE cross paths over a misdirected email. The connection is instant, electric, they feel like they’ve known each other forever. Nick buys a new suit, gets on a train. Bee steadies her nerves, gets a pep talk from her best friend Leila. This is it. Except it isn’t. Because as they prepare to meet under the clock at Euston station, the universe throws in a twist you’d never see coming . . .

When Dylan Coughlan impulsively rings into a radio competition she never expected to win. But now she's about to travel around the world. The catch? Her travel partner is a random contact from her phone. And of course it had to be Jack the Posho, the man she accidentally ghosted. The two couldn't be more different, and as the trip kicks off, Jack seems like he'd sooner fling himself into the sun than have a conversation with Dylan. But more is hinging on this trip than the chance to see the world.

People disappear when they most want to be seen. Jess Walker, middle child of a middle class family, has perfected the art of vanishing in plain sight. But when she arrives at a concrete university campus under flat, grey East Anglian skies, her world flares with colour. Drawn into a tightly knit group of rule breakers - led by their maverick teacher, Lorna Clay - Jess begins to experiment with a new version of herself. But the dynamic between the friends begins to darken as they share secrets, lovers and finally a tragedy.

In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supplement published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars. The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad.

Julia has landed a fresh start—at a 'pan-European' restaurant. 'Imagine that,' says her mother. 'I'm imagining.' Nick is flirting with sobriety, and nobody else. Did you know: adults his age are now more likely to live with their parents than a romantic partner? Life should have started to take shape by now—but instead, we're trying on new versions of ourselves, swiping left and right, and searching for a convincing answer to that question: 'what do you do?'

Best friends forever. That's the pact you made. You'd do anything for her. And you have. She's always had it all. If you could take it for yourself...would you?

Welcome to The Island. Where your worst fears are about to come true. It was supposed to be the perfect holiday: a week-long trip for six teenage friends on a remote tropical island. But when their guide dies of a stroke leaving them stranded, the trip of a lifetime turns into a nightmare. Because someone on the island knows each of the group’s worst fears. And one by one, they’re becoming a reality.

Cordelia knows books. An addict-turned-dealer of classic paperbacks, when she's not spending her days combing the charity shops and jumble sales of suburban London for valuable collector's items, she's pining for the woman of her dreams and nimbly avoiding her landlord's demands for rent. The most elusive prize of all, her white whale, has surfaced—a set of magnificent, vintage Sleuth Hound crime novels. Gorgeous, and as rare as they come. Just one problem. They're not for sale. Still, that won't stop a resourceful woman like Cordelia…